Well, I don’t that’s for certain. Just the PC, some copper cables and a router. I’ve got a computer ID and a URL for any site I maintain. I’ve no idea what happens to those little packets of digital data that stream in and out of the router. They tell me Skype is encrypted, but how would I know?

Plenty of people can learn lots about me. Social media give a lot away to anyone caring to look. Governments will almost certainly have automatic systems to check who is saying what to whom on the Internet. If they don’t they will be buying the software to do so right now.

Internet black holes

The logical direction is a full-encrypted P2P world. The downside of a PgPP2P (as opposed to client-server, where only servers supply) world is no one else can know what’s being said between these two people. (Entrance, stage left, cipherpunk Julian Assange, encryption software in hand) Sometimes even Internet People might be happy for their governments to have ways of finding things out. The trend is more towards individuals giving up their privacy in return for what the Internet and Web provides in exchange. Both governments and non-governmental organisations are taking full advantage of this while it lasts.

The give-up-your-privacy-social-media seem to be in a cross over graph with Govt 1.0 which is in the process of changing to Govt 2.0, most wholeheartedly in local govt. At the moment social media are just underneath the cross-over. WikiLeaks and others are pushing the whole thing up to the cross-over a lot quicker. The biggest thing from WikiLeaks will be a unrelenting exposure of kleptocratic government. Even non-kleptocrats will be worrying about this: so many democratic govts. have cosy relationships with kleptocrasies. France recently had one with Tunisia. Was that because they were selling them french made armaments? Some of the U.S.A’s best friends are keptocrats. Easier to do big arms deals with them, too. Who does Indonesia buy its military harware from? Israel, which is not a kleptocracy except in that the U.S. govt.hands an awful lot of American tax payer’s money over to it without asking. So in a sense it’s an inverse Kleptocracy, in which a state not individuals receives the handout. So the U.S. govt. is doing the stealing from its own people to keep another sate going.

Who owns the Internet is an important question. If governments feel they are getting locked out of individuals lives, they may want to more impose rules on Internet usage that P2P-type people don’t want or like.

Tim Bermers-Lee is the most prominent advocate of a neutral Net. Most people haven’t the faintest idea what this would mean or require in practice. It’s not going to happen if every no-democratic state keeps control of the copper wires, optical fibe and satellites they put into space.

The reason I found Wikileaks interesting and thought it would be a good idea to set up a WikiLeaks dedicated blog, was partly because it was an ideal opportunity to re-examine the wider implications of the Internet and Web. Anyone with half an ear for the digital zietgeist can’t fail to read up on the implications of WikLeaks and other areas of change in the digital arena.

One of these things is the Govt 2.0 The problem arises when a yawning Govt. 2.0 gap builds up, say between authoritarian states and democracies. This is not exactly a firm basis for net neutrality (or open data) if the U.S. becomes compeletely open and China remains closed. In fact, the ways things go, it is inevitable that the U.S. will drag China kicking and screaming intop the open world

Both types of states have an interest in reading the minds of their citizens. Interestinglt social media such as faceBook and twitter are the simplest and easiest way for them to do so. Every new digital technology has a downside.

P2P proper only arrives when there is Pretty Good privacy for all. And yet no govt. wasnt this because they have got used to checking on peopoe with the technology uptodate.

Coinciding with a recent WikiLeaks leak a lot of publicity for Govt 2.0 and visualisation techniques through the work on the WikLeaks data but others.

The WDIK column
Twitter is proving to be important. It wouldn’t be so important if there were no mobile feeds into the system.

The Tunisian authorities, it is reported, had the Internet as tight as a gnats bottom – as China has. Though the news is that just before he flew the coop to Malta/France/Saudi Arabia (probably right now sitting down by the poolside with an ice-cool Carlesberg, evoking for me the iconic Heinekin scene at the end of Ice Cold in Alex…oh, perhaps not, it’s a dry country),

Internet Ali removed some of the filters. Or – as we’ll learn sooner than later – the current regime did, in order to reduce the pressure.

In my scrabble to Rolodex this blog, I haven’t bothered to make any comments of my own, letting the trend of the material indicate where I am coming from/going to. It isn’t difficult to imagine Govt 1.0 scrambling to find technologies to help them keep ahead of their populations. Govt 2.0 and Citizen 2.0 evident in many places: it won’t be long before there is talk of Govt 3.0, which will be another way of talking P2P politics/society qua Michel Bauwens